Art for ____________’s sake. What would you fill in?

A few weeks back I was in NYC and had the opportunity to attend a Public Forum event featuring the brilliant Jeremy McCarter reading from his new book Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals, and an equally brilliant panel of renowned activists and artists doing a staged reading of the timely, and at once harrowing and humorous, 1917 one-act by Susan Glaspell, The People. It was a great evening and McCarter’s book is now sitting on my Kindle, next in the queue. Toward the end of the evening McCarter turned to the rather large panel of activists and artists he had assembled and asked them to reflect on the phrase Art for Art’s Sake.

There was an awkward silence.

The first couple respondents squirmed a bit and then shrugged off the phrase as being all but useless these days. Others looked like they hoped they would not be called upon to answer.

Someone, as I recall, asked, “What do we even mean when we use that phrase?”

Indeed.

I remember thinking: This is so funny. A panel discussing ideals and art and activism, in a theater, and no on on stage seems willing or able to engage with the idea of art for art’s sake.

Then a visual artist from Cuba stepped up to defend the concept, suggesting that these words come to signify something quite specific and meaningful if you have ever lived under an oppressive regime that censors your ability to make the work you want to make.

Some nods of ascent.

Another panelist said he valued the phrase in the sense that his very existence as a black man making his living as a poet (a rare breed, he suggested) was meaningful to black and brown youth considering their own possibilities in life.

More nods of ascent.

But the question that it seemed most were wrestling with was: If not “for” someone else, or some other purpose, then why make art?

This seems to be the stance-du-jour on l’art pour l’art.

For the past three years I have led a variety of workshops (on business models, marketing, values, transformation, change) with arts admin types. Frequently, I include a slide in my deck with the following phrase and ask people to fill in the blank (it’s a question I stole from Clay Lord, who posted it on Facebook):

Art for ____________’s sake.

In three years, no one has ever said art.

The most common answers are “the society” or “the audience” or “the people.”

I get it.

I wrestled with art for art’s sake for much of 2014 as I designed my course on beauty and aesthetics for business school majors. That wrestling match ended the second week of class, when I brought in a graduate student from the art department, named Tara Austin, to do a drawing workshop with the students. At the end of her drawing workshop Tara talked about her own work, which is inspired by beauty in the natural world. At the time, she was doing a series of abstract orchids.

Tara Austin. Orchidaceae #4. Oil and Acrylic on Panel. 2015

Tara showed slides of several of her orchids and then asked if there were any questions. The first business student to raise her hand said something to this effect:

So, you said that you are only painting orchids. And, I mean, do you think this could be a problem? I mean, maybe people don’t want orchids, orchids, orchids. Maybe not that many people like orchids—maybe some like other kinds of flowers. Or something other than flowers? I mean, I just wonder, are you thinking about this?

Tara paused for a second and then replied,

Um. That’s a really interesting question. No, I’m not thinking about that, actually. I’m painting orchids at the moment because they are really interesting to me and so I guess I will keep painting them until I’m ready to move on to another idea.

After the fact, as I reflected on this moment, I thought it was quite brilliant. A quite reasonable question from a business school student: Is there sufficient demand for orchids? Do you know your market? Do you think you may need to diversify?

And a quite reasonable answer from an arts student: I’m interested in the idea for its own sake; right now, I’m not thinking about whether there is a market for orchids.

And I could not have architected a better moment to convey the different logics or rationalities of business and art, or what art for art’s sake, or research for the sake of research, or exploration for the sake of exploration, or excellence for the sake of excellence are all about. Through this brief conversation between an artist and business student, I was able to experience the world of business and the world of art as parallel systems of value. This experiencefinally helped me make sense of, and come to terms with, the phrase art for art’s sake.

There are other parallel systems of value. In his 2010 monograph Economies of Life: Patterns of Health and Wealth, Bill Sharpe elaborates five “economies” and their “shared denominations of value” in a table. The last of these is the experience economy of art.

Economy

Currency

Statement of Shared Denomination of Value

Competitive Games

Score

The economy of scoring coordinates individual games of a particular kind into a collective competitive sport.

Democracy

Votes

The economy of democracy coordinates individual preferences into collective policies and powers.

The economy of exchange coordinates individual use values of alienable property into collective markets.

Experience

Art

The economy of experience coordinates individual lives into the collective experience of being human

What Sharpe’s framework seeks to illustrate is the incommensurate nature of these various currencies of shared valuation. The score of a sports game may tell us who won or lost but it can’t help us understand the individual or shared experience of the game, for example. Sharpe elaborates on art as the currency of experience, writing (on p. 46):

To see something as art is to respond to it as an expression of personal experience, as the trace of life. To become art, something must move from being private to circulating amongst us as a means of sharing the experience of being human, taking its place in the continuous dance of our culture. In doing so, like dance, its meaning is made, shared, and reflexively remakes our experience of our selves.

Put another way: art is the way we share with one another what it means to be human. To embrace the notion of art for art’s sake in this sense, is also to say, “We need dance/poetry/theater because only the aesthetic form of dance/poetry/theater can allow us to share with one another the experience of being human, using the language of dance/poetry/theater.”

Something like this idea infuses the gorgeous 2012 book Artful by Ali Smith—an extraordinary piece of fiction cum art essay, or vice versa, that I just finished. The apt description on the back cover reads: “Artful is a celebration of literature’s worth in and to the world. It is about the things art can do, the things art is made of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness.”

In one of four sections, On Form, Smith writes (on p. 76):

Even formlessness has form.

And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left—say we lost everything—we’d still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognized line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we’ve forgotten we even know it. I placed a jar in Tennessee. Once we know it, we’ll never not know it. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May. They always will. Rhythm itself is a kind of form and, regardless of whether it’s poetry or prose, it becomes a kind of dwelling place for us.

Valuing art for art’s sake is about understanding the value of this dwelling place.

And a bit earlier, Smith writes (on p. 74):

Form never stops. And form is always environmental. Like a people’s songs will tell you about the heart and the aspirations of that people, like their language and their use of it will tell you what their concerns are, material and metaphysical, their artforms will tell you everything about where they live and the shape they’re in.

When I read this passage I thought about seeing a presentation, four years ago now, by Georgetown professor of public diplomacy, Cynthia P. Schneider, who has argued that an important method for understanding any culture is to observe the works of its artists. Schneider has spoken and written extensively on the lessons in diplomacy from the Arab Spring, and in particular has examined the question that many were asking in the days following the revolution—Why didn’t we (America), in particular the CIA, see the Arab Spring coming?

Schneider asserts that this is the wrong question because it reflects a “twentieth-century-men-in-suits-around-a-table version of diplomacy.” Ultimately, she argues that we missed the Arab Spring because we were looking in the wrong place. Instead of “governments talking to governments and authorities talking to authorities,” diplomats and intelligence agencies should have been listening to the music of Arab hip-hop artists, looking at the graffiti on their walls, and watching their films. If they had, they would have anticipated the revolution. While they might not have predicted its time and date, she makes the case (using lyrics, text, and visual images) that they would have, without a doubt, sensed that it was coming.

This is also what it means to value art for art’s sake.

***

Just as we understand the value of research aimed at answering a question that may not have immediate utility to industry, so too can we understand the value of a set of questions being pursued through art for no other reason than because they are of interest to the artist. Scientists must increasingly defend “pure scientific research” as it is a space being eaten alive by the demands of economically lucrative industry-university partnerships. In the same vein, we need to be able to defend the “art for art’s sake” end of the art world spectrum, alongside the other end, “art for civic purposes,” which we have now, perforce, grown quite accustomed to defending.

Comments

Thanks, once again, for a revelatory and much-needed reminder of the necessity of art to individuals and society. It has sparked a jumbled cascade of reflections. Here’s a couple off the top: A Buddhist teacher and poet, Norman Fischer, said – shortly after last November’s election – that reading novels, listening to music and gathering with friends – among other activities – were vital forms of resistance to authoritarianism, which cannot abide the “useless,” is threatened by creativity and deep communication,

In Norman’s Buddhist-informed view (now echoed by many findings in neuroscience), it’s the faculty of imagination that allows us to experience what we call “reality.” In that sense, we’re all artists, all the time. Our consciousness takes in a chaos of wave forms and dancing particles and transforms it into sight, sound, taste, emotion, thought, language.

Without imagination would we be able to recognize each other? Isn’t memory a form of imagination, a creative act, an art form? Through consciousness/imagination, we continuously (re-) create the world . Is discomfort with “art for art’s sake” actually a discomfort with the confusing, irrational and mysterious condition of being human?

I have often thought the phrase, “Art for art’s sake” a bit unfortunate. I think it points to something important, but in the wrong way. Specifically, I have trouble with the word ‘for’ being used here. ‘For’ is a distancing word, and it is bound up with notions of instrumentality. And I think the idea that something is instrumental for itself misses the point.

The distinction isn’t just between things that are good for something and things that are good for other things, but between things we justify by their instrumentality and things that are NOT justified in the same way. It would be strange to say they justify themselves, in other words. Rather, we need to start seeing them as THE SOURCES of our justification. There are things we measure, and there are the measures themselves. This is a HUGE difference, and we need to appreciate that for many of us art IS that source of value….

I think it is better phrased when you suggest “Valuing art for art’s sake is about understanding the value of this dwelling place.” The dwelling place IS what distinguishes things measured from the measures. It is the form of life that takes these things as the measure of value.

And it cannot be easily seen from the outside, unfortunately. But describing it as a dwelling place puts the emphasis correctly, I think: We need to inhabit the system of values for them to make their proper sense AS measures and things measured.

Different frameworks divide them differently, and from the outside, where the variety of possible measures are mostly unknown, it often makes no sense to SEE THEM as measures. Instead, we lump them in with the other things that get measured by the measures we know….

What is the phrase about walking in another person’s shoes? We simply do not get to understand how things look, what actually matters here, unless we step inside their dwelling place. Walking in another’s shoes is how we try on their values for size, how we make sense of the measures they carry out into the world.

So, “Art for art’s sake” may miss the larger point of art as it becomes a frame of reference within the world we inhabit.

I’m sorry, but the first “fill in the blank” word that immediately came to mind…

“Art for f***’s sake!”

Maybe this comes from a that mix of impatience and indifference that comes from growing older. A couple of months before my mother died, she emerged from her dementia to join a discussion discussion we were having on music and dance. I was saying that my mother and dad loved to go from Berkeley/Oakland, over the Bridge to “The City,” to dance to the great Big Bands of the 1940s. Suddenly, she woke up from her doze to say, “We should spend our life dancing instead of how we have.”

I might agree with art for art’s sake, as long as we realize something that I’ve almost never heard said out loud: the purpose of art is to prompt the creation of more art.

In that vein, “art for art’s sake” means that art must reproduce.

Basically, if an audience watches your performance — of music, dance, theater, painting, whatever — and at least a few people don’t leave the event thinking to themselves that they want to go start creating something themselves, you might as well not have bothered. Artists must motivate others to become artists — everyone. No matter how poor you are, how rickety, whether you have arthritis or can’t afford a million-dollar instrument or real art classes, or are too old to get any good, etc. etc. etc.

If I were to perform my music, I’d want people to leave thinking to themselves, “Damn it, I want to go take that cake decorating class!” “I don’t care if I’ll never be any good, I’m going to go buy that trumpet and take some lessons.” “I know my spouse thinks I’m stupid for wanting to learn to paint, but I’m going to do it anyway.” “I left an unfinished novel on that old thumb drive, and I’m going to go finish it. And then I’ll start the next one.”

THAT is what I would want MY art to do. For it to prompt other people to let their lights shine.

THAT is what “art for art’s sake” means to me.

And that’s the opposite message to what an awful lot of art sends nowdays. A lot of music tacitly tells the audience, “We’re ARTISTS. We’re so special, our instruments cost a million dollars, we started doing this when we were two years old, and losers like YOU might as well not even bother.” “I went to art school for a zillion years, you’ll never be able to paint like this.”

Art shouldn’t create an audience. Art must create artists. If it does that, it will gain an audience, because people love being awakened to the right to let their own lights shine, no matter how dimly or brightly.

Yet all that’s ever brought up is butts in seats, ticket sales, audiences, money money money … In other words, “We don’t give a shit what you might come up with, you’re supposed to sit there, shut up, and digest what WE give you. Quietly. And don’t clap until we tell you to.”

I say again: If your art doesn’t prompt some of its audience to get home and start making their own art, no matter how unpracticed or amateur, you might as well not have bothered.

I couldn’t agree more! The binary distortion of “Artist” vs “Non-Artist” impoverishes everyone. I make my art to inspire others and want the same when I read, listen to music, go to theatre, watch films, view paintings. Had I not had access (thanks to my mother) to all these forms for as long as I can remember, I can’t imagine what my life would have been like.

Yup. In a way, it’s almost a little bit like the way that people read books and see movies and go off to write their own stories about the characters. That sort of fanfiction stuff has a really bad reputation for being tacky and lowbrow, but at least people are being introduced to a universe by someone else’s creative efforts, and their response to it is for their OWN creative juices to start flowing. That’s the way all response to art should be (within copyright law, of course).

That participatory response to art was invented long ago, but nowdays it’s the New Normal. The old-school art world has to adapt to it. In a world where people expect to see a TV show and write their own stories about it, make their own costumes, or even write music or paint pictures about it, merely consuming the art and then going home or at most writing a review just isn’t enough anymore.

You know what might be interesting is a blog post series that looks at what I might call community performance, performing art done by … well, normal people. 🙂 I think it would be worthwhile for the professional art world to be aware of and familiar with the ways that people come together to make organized top-flight art on their own, with no conservatory kids or paid outreach directors in the room.

It could include anything from square dancing to informal folk music to barbershop choruses — many of the members of which can’t read music but who can stun you out of your shoes with how beautiful they sound. The emphasis would be not on how some tiger mother someplace could force their child to do it from the age of four or how you could pry money out of people to come watch, but how relatively untrained people who started as adults got involved and have fun. You really only need shoes to square dance, a voice to sing, and a relatively cheap keyless flute to play most folk music for example, You don’t HAVE to be Jean Butler or Matt Molloy, and most people aren’t — but they never imagine that this means that they have no right to form a club with like-minded friends and do it anyway.

I’m not saying that this series would be to educate “the people” as to the existence and beauty of these forms of “untrained” community performance. I’m saying that it would educate the professional, trained art world about their existence. Hell, things like yarn-bombings can be included as beautiful, meaningful community art installations made often by people with ZERO art training. I might include historical reenacting in this as well, especially the first person stuff that is basically a huge all-consuming method acting gig where the person in question even makes their own costume and character and has to learn their craft like spinning, brewing, or smithing.

I wish I had a blog and the time to do this, actually … I just think it would be illuminating for professionals, for example, to realize that some of the people they think of as unwashed muggles that they’re trying to get to come sit quietly in the city concert hall might be playing Irish music in a local bar with friends, spending their weekends in a portable loom at the nearby historical park, or helping cover lampposts and trees in a local city park with crocheted doilies. It’s not a matter of muggles versus wizards: we’re all wizards in the end. Some of us just don’t know about the others’ magic.

Jeez, this would be a nice thesis project, now that I think about it … 🙁

Great points, Janis. A few years ago I started using SoundCloud (an online platform for posting any kind of audio file) to post songs I was working on. In the process I discovered a large community of musicians, composers and performers, none of whom were famous, many of whom were not “professional” who were putting out some wonderful music. Similarly, back in the late 1920s, when the first really good recording systems were coming into being, record companies started scouring the country for people to record. They shlepped their huge machines all over the place, putting ads in local papers for local players to turn out. That’s how the world came to know Mississippi John Hurt, The Carter Family, The Memphis Jug Band and many other iconic musicians whose influence still enlivens our culture. They were all “community” performers with “day jobs.”

Thank you for these thoughts- as always, i am better off for your words, in person or in print.

To me, a conversation about art for art’s sake is inseparable from a conversation about the systemic conditions that allow, or don’t allow, each of us to pursue ‘that dwelling place’ with differing levels of attention, privilege and currency in the economies of time and energy..

I think creating, expressing and imagining are actions we all undertake. I think the refinement of those actions, the purpose towards which we put those actions, and the spaces/settings in which those actions land, actually make up the context that then determines what ‘sake’ we ascribe art to have been made for..

I think historically, and today to a degree, ‘art for art’s sake’ can be used as a phrase to push up against a call to acknowledge the role power plays in why someone makes what they do, what they make, and how its received critically.

I don’t think we need to rise to the defense of art for art’s sake- i think we need to rise to the defense of all artists making what they are called to make/do. Emphasis on the all. Emphasis on the do.

Far from not seeing the so-called Arab Spring coming, the USA played a significant role in its creation. The goal wasn’t to establish democracies, but to foment civil wars that would cause long-term destabilization and weaken these countries thus strengthening American hegemony in the region. Wesley Clark discusses this work in his new book, how the USA planned to overthrow the governments of seven countries in five years. See:

Especially interesting was the CIA’s use of software that allowed agents to control about 20 different sock puppet Internet identities they could use in social media to foment revolution. More details here:

In many regards, the Arab Spring was not a spontaneous cultural uprising, but the use of social engineering to destabilize countries. The worst cataclysm these efforts caused has been Syria. – unspeakable death and suffering.

This relates to the arts and has a long history, such as the way the CIA used its front organization during the 50s, 60s, and 70s, The Congress for Cultural Freedom, to tilt the arts away from social issues toward abstract expressionism, exactly because it was non-political. The socially oriented art of the 30s and the cultural continuums it would have created after the war, were thus removed from American society. Art for capitalism’s sake. Or art to weaken Social Realism. Why are Americans so naïve?

Thank you, William Osborne. This makes sense to me. Our responses since 9-11 seem designed to sow confusion, and not to build a viable government of any kind, and least of all, genuine democracies. For decades, there have also been pretty successful attempts to bankrupt the US Treasury, making the government incapable of regulating anything. That Mission? Accomplished!

Do you know Gene Sharp and the work of the Albert Einstein Institution?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Start_a_Revolution
… and his book,.. From Dictatorship to Democracy? He’s remarkably influential around the world, and almost unknown here, even though he’s gotten much more exposure in the last few years. He’s been accused of working for the CIA. That seems ridiculous, given his history, but I have no doubt they are studying his techniques, just has they study BATTLE OF ALGIERS, the famous movie about French imperialism.

I was recently trying to explain the role of the CIA in funding “abstract art” to a friend, and they couldn’t get it. Your explanation is more clear than mine. I’ve heard it explained a little differently, as something that would be more creative and much more appealing to innovate artists than the inflated poses of Soviet social realism. From that perspective it’s more of an advertisement of the artistic freedoms in the USA. It was not a hard argument to make, since Stalinist art is even more boring than official Mormon art. The Soviets, like Hitler, were often brutal to what they considered “degenerate” expressionists. The OSS and the early CIA hired poets to analyze intelligence data. They were not tech geeks, bureaucrats, and desk rats, like they are today. They were frighteningly smart, with a range of varied thinkers at work. I suspect we would be surprised at who actually worked for the CIA. One of Buckminster Fuller’s closest collaborators, E.J. Applewhite (Synergetics, Parts I & II), was a member of the CIA. When Bucky tried to pull the lid off these antics in Critical Path and Grunch, he expressed a hope that his “friends” wouldn’t see him as a traitor. He called the CIA, Capitalism’s Invisible Army. His son in law, Robert Synder, worked for the OSS during WWII. He also warned us about Wall Street lawyers in Critical Path.

Abstract art grew out of spiritual movements in the 19th C, and, surprisingly, it seems to have begun with the paintings of Victor Hugo.

I don’t think the Soviets or the NY galleries and investors really knew what to do with the spiritual roots of abstract art. The biggest major show on those roots was at LACMA. Only Los Angeles would be capable of bringing the spiritual into the discussion, and those roots go back long before the Soviets or the CIA.

I’ve heard from Russians who know the history, that Stanisvlavski had to create the theory of physical actions to purify his practice of its spiritual roots, and bring it in line with historical materialism. In fact, the roots of his work, esp. the relaxation techniques, go back to yoga.

The persecutions in Soviet Russia of symbolist and expressionist artists go back to the 1920s and 1930s, and the ostracizing of the most innovative Russian theater artists, such as Meyerhold.

Michael Chekhov, Anton’s nephew, had to leave Russia because his practices were so heavily rooted in East Indian philosophy and the work of George Steiner! Steiner’s fascinating abstractionist art projects are almost completely unknown.

To me, one of the big questions is why we need to assign a reason “for” art. Is it not for the artist and the audience to decide their own “for?” How often is it the case that what an artist intends may not be the ultimate outcome.

The need to assign a purpose for art is driven by external factors. Philanthropists are funding “art for social change.” Collectors want art for “investment value.” Museums want art that will bring in audiences. These influencers shape the way artists perceive their value and craft.

The other impact of asking the “for” question is to alienate or discourage most people from participating in artistic experiences. Many people perceive formal and informal cultural institutions as separate from their world/experience. Could this be an outcome of placing too many expectations on the individual or collective audience?. Maybe there is too much pressure to understand what the artist is “trying to say” or the “purpose of the piece.”

Perhaps, we need to search for other questions that recognize the value of the process, as well as the impact.

Thanks, Diane, for your thoughtful insights and consistent probing of these interesting questions.

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Diane Ragsdale

Diane Ragsdale is an Assistant Professor in the College of Performing Arts at The New School, where she also serves as Program Director for the MA in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship. Alongside her post at the New School Diane teaches on the Cultural Leadership Program at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada and teaches a workshop on Cultural Policy at Yale University for its Theater Management MA. She is also a doctoral candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam (in the Netherlands), where she lectured 2011-2015 in the cultural economics and sociology of the arts programs. Read More…

Jumper

About 20 years ago, when I was in graduate school, I came across the following poem:
When an old pond
gets a new frog
it’s a new pond.
I think the inverse also may be true.
I’ve often been the new frog jumping into an old pond. Since 1988, I’ve worked in the arts in the US in various roles … [Read More...]

If you want a quicker read, then you may want to skip the speeches and opt for the article, "Recreating Fine Arts Institutions," which was published in the November 2009 Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Here is a recent essay commissioned by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts for the 2011 State of the Arts Conference in London, "Rethinking Cultural Philanthropy".

In 2012 I documented a meeting among commercial theater producers and nonprofit theater directors to discuss partnerships between the two sectors in the development of new theatrical work, which is published by HowlRound. You can get a copy of this report, "In the Intersection," on the HowlRound Website. Finally, last year I also had essays published in Doug Borwick's book, Building Communities Not Audiences and Theatre Bay Area's book (edited by Clay Lord), Counting New Beans.